Kurt Kauper's Diva Fictions are paintings of imaginary opera singers, invented characters of glamorous condescension and fashionable dazzle, excessive theatricality and overt emotionalism, transmitting a wide range of contemporary cultural realities.

Kurt Kauper, Diva Fictions

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Deitch Projects

Despite, or perhaps in ironic conjunction with, Rudy Giuliani's efforts to make New York City clean and pristine, graffiti has become a respected staple of the gallery scene. Barry "Twist" McGee's tags and caricatures are no exception, nor were they when displayed at the Venice Biennale this past summer. With more than 15 years of street cred, the California tagger's lively, humorous, and often bulbous depictions of street characters don't so much bring the street into the gallery as bring the gallery out into the street.

Barry McGee: The Buddy System

Known for his expressive, skater-punk, urban landscape drawings that combine image and text in an irreverent, angst-ridden, deliberately pathetic sort of way, Chris Johanson takes over where Raymond Pettibon leaves off. Less angry and witty than his predecessor, Johanson scribbles colorful, dead-on portraits of street culture and the yuppies, hippies, hipsters, losers and drunkards who inhabit it.

Chris Johanson

"The twentieth century was a century in which human experiment in cruelty reached its height. I have decided to be a cockroach for a day, and see what is happening in this city through its eyes." These words from Yoko Ono, a groundbreaking visionary in the art world for over 50 years, is her manifesto-like description of the thoughts and ideas that went into Odyssey of a Cockroach. This elegant catalogue, with more than 40 color reproductions of the related exhibit, leads its readers through her installation through Ono's exciting narrative.

Odyssey of a Cockroach

Yoko Ono

Live Through This brings together more than 30 of the most exciting art, music and fashion personalities who are changing art making in New York. New art practice is now intimately tied to the lived experience of the artists themselves, and this book, through more than three hundred color photographs of artists, artworks, studios, off-duty behaviors, zines, concerts, openings and parties, illustrates and examines the nature of this relationship. Thoughtful criticism is provided by five essays: Larry Rinder writes about the groundbreaking nature of Fort Thunder and Providence scene, Jeffrey Deitch offers an historical and personal look at New York's underground, musician Philip Guichard describes the past five years of music in the city, digital artist Cory Arcangel talks about collectives and new media, while Kathy Grayson provides a behind-the-scenes thesis. Major attention is paid to artists working in New York City, but also in Providence and San Francisco. The list includes several major names in art, fashion and music, but some decidedly underground ones, thus emphasizing community affiliations and working collaborations. This is a most authentic look at what New York's art scene truly is, organized and produced by the members themsleves through extensive collaboration.

Live Through This: New York 2005

History & Criticism

This slim but explosive glossy-magazine-sized paperback, designed by the talented Japanese art collective, Enlightenment, and edited by the Tokyo-based curator and gallerist, Hiromi Yoshii, collects new work by a small and tightly interrelated group of Japan's most exciting new artists, all of whom are involved in portraying what could be described as a 'post-reality world.' Brought together by Yoshii for the exhibition, After the Reality, at New York's Deitch Projects this past summer, the works present a blend of fantasy and reality, fears and emotions, all set amidst an optimistic embrace of life and a foreboding of death. Featuring works on canvas by Yoshitaka Azuma, C-prints by Enlightenment, watercolors by Koichi Enomoto, video collages and drawings by Taro Izumi, drawings and installation work by Soichiro Matsubara and more drawings and video clips from Aya Ohki, it's a skinny, sexy glimpse into what's happening in Japanese contemporary art right now.

After the Reality

How arbitrary are the marks, analog and digital, used to express language, and where do they begin to muck it all up? This first book from Tauba Auerbach, Yes and Not Yes features over 20 new paintings and drawings that spring from those questions. They offer an excellent if roundabout answer: while letters are largely arbitrary, they are rich with abstract beauty and conceptual depth. In razor-sharp execution--which reveals her training as a sign painter--Auerbach's works on panel and paper update the abstract conceptual tradition, while retaining its intellectual rigor. Uppercase Insides and Numeral Insides recall Russian Suprematism, and, upon further contemplation, turn out to be just what their titles call them. Works based on signal flags and the Ugaritic Alphabet--an extinct language from Syria, 1300 B.C.--confirm that puzzlement is part of the desired effect here. Where direct exchange between sign and meaning is impossible, the beauty of the symbol comes to the fore.

Tauba Auerbach: How To Spell the Alphabet

Auerbach, Tauba

Panic Room collects works by 91 of the most exciting new and emerging artists on the international scene, all of whom work with drawing as their primary medium. Gathered into book form by the well-known Washington State designer, Rachel Carns, this big, bold compendium showcases an eclectic and unconventional group of artists who mix contemporary art with the culture of comics, graffiti, music, psychedelia and fantasy. Artists include assume vivid astro focus (whose work Carns modifies to create an especially hot cover), Tauba Auerbach, Devendra Banhart, Hernan Bas, Marc Bell, Hisham Bharoocha, John Bock, Brian Chippendale, Bjorn Copeland, Verne Dawson, Sam Durant, Robert Gutierrez, Daniel Guzman, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Cameron Jamie, Margaret Kilgallen, M/M (Paris), Barry McGee, Ted Mineo, Dave Muller, Ben Peterson, Paper Rad, Matthew Ritchie, Clare Rojas, Jim Shaw, David Shrigley, Kelley Walker and others.

Panic Room: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Works on Paper Collection

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Meet the Artists presents an extraordinary collaborative project between Jake and Dinos Chapman, George Condo and Paul McCarthy. It came about when the four artists were invited by the London arts agency, RS&A, to collaborate on the creation of eight paintings and a set of etchings over a period of one year. The project was commenced in March 2006, when one large canvas, one small canvas and one etching plate were delivered to each artist's studio. The collaborators were given a month to work before their paintings and etching plates were collected and rotated to the next artist in a prearranged sequence. Each canvas and etching plate rotated four times in total so that each participating artist had the chance to be first, second, third and fourth in the sequential makeup of a single painting and etching plate. An exquisite corpse for four of today's most interesting living artists.

Meet the Artists: The First Collaboration by the Phenomenal Pop Combo Jake, George, Paul and Dinos

Surge and Shadow presents ambitious new work by Kristin Baker, formerly best known for her critically-acclaimed paintings of automobile racing. In the large-scale acrylic paintings on PVC gathered here, Baker riffs on very different subject matter: historical paintings ranging back from the New York School to encompass nineteenth-century Romanticism and history painting. In this body of work, one senses the sweeping dramatic symphonies and tragic wreckages of Turner and the Romantic painters of the early nineteenth century so that Baker's crashing colors gain impact from the heft of her materials and technique, unleashing a "visual force field that absorbs the viewer in the passion of the moment," according to Yale University Art Gallery's Jennifer Gross. Also included are Baker's recent explorations of freestanding painting-constructions that approach sculptural dimensions. Kristin Baker attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and received her MFA from Yale University in 2002. Deitch Projects presented her first solo exhibition, Flat Out, in New York in September of 2003.

Kristin Baker: Surge and Shadow

Gross, Jennifer

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Books by Deitch Projects